U.S. vote on Israel widely seen as symbolic final act
Obama felt need to take a stand
HONOLULU — It took eight years of backbiting and pretending they got along for relations between President Barack Obama’s administration and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to finally hit rock bottom.
Though they’ve clashed bitterly before, mostnotably over Iran, the two governments seem farther apart than ever after a speech Wednesday by Secretary of State John Kerry and last week’s U.N. resolution.
The key question for the Obama administration, newly willing to air grievances with Israel on live television, is why now?
“We cannot, in good conscience, do nothing and say nothing when we see the hope of peace slipping away,” Kerry said in a speech that ran more than an hour.
Yet in just over three weeks, Obama will no longer be president, Kerry will no longer be secretary of state, and the United States will have a new leader under no obligation to embrace any of what Kerry said. President-elect Donald Trump has assured Israel that things will be different after Jan. 20, when he’s to be inaugurated, and lamented how the Jewish state was “being treated very, very unfairly.”
Kerry took pains to voice America’s staunch commitment to Israel’s security and support for its future, and to detail U.S. complaints about Palestinian leadership and its failure to sufficiently deter violence against Israelis. He laid out a six-point framework for a potential peace deal that it will be up to the next U.S. government to try to enact, if it chooses to do so.
The White House has portrayed Obama’s decision to break with tradition by abstaining from — rather than vetoing — a U.N. Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal as a reaction forced by other countries that brought it up for a vote. Obama didn’t seek this out, his aides have argued.
Yet the White House has also acknowledged that Obama had long considered the possibility of taking some symbolic step before leaving office to leave his imprint on the debate. For much of the year, his staff pored over options that included a U.N. resolution outlining principles for a peace deal and a presidential speech much like the one Kerry gave Wednesday. Yet there was reluctance to act before the U.S. election, given the way it would have thrust the Israeli-Palestinian issue into the campaign.
Kerry acknowledged Trump appears to favor a different approach. Yet, frustrated by years of Israeli actions he deemed counterproductive for peace, Obama appeared to have decided it was better to make his administration’s views known while still in office, even if it risked a blockbuster clash with one of America’s closest allies.
Trump wouldn’t say whether settlements should be reined in. But he told reporters Israel was being “treated very, very unfairly by a lot of different people.”
A day after the speech, the European Union seemed to rally behind Kerry’s message. EU spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic says his speech showed “the international community does not give up on peace in the Middle East.”
While Israel’s Arab population has citizenship rights, the 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank do not, and most in annexed east Jerusalem have only residency rights.